Tag: Humanities

When he was a student in the early 1980s, Emory University English professor Mark Bauerlein and his peers spoke with their professors regularly and at length, knowing “that these moments were the heart of liberal education.” Today, polls show, one-third of students never do so.

A prominent technologist and advocate for the inclusion of women in the tech economy tells Guardian art critic Adrian Searle she wasted her youth on a languages degree, and that young Britons need to get with the “coding” revolution if they wish to pay off their university debts and be relevant to society.

The struggle for the serious study and appreciation of literature continues in our society, where enormous emphasis has been placed on the “practical” disciplines of math and science, and specialized academics more and more produce arcane, overtly politicized work that the public seems to find joyless and irrelevant. (more)

The well-intentioned handwringing over what to do about the slow asphyxiation of the traditional American humanities education continues over at Salon.com, where novelist Kim Brooks laments the failure of liberal arts colleges to prepare students for professionally and financially rewarding careers. (more)

At a time when our country’s educational system is sliding down our government’s priority list, it takes reminders like this one, by noted California educator Jim Mamer, to set us straight and offer some much-needed inspiration.

How about a little cognitive psychology with your English literature? Professors who normally spend their time thinking about Virginia Woolf’s characters and story structures are taking a page from scientific texts to add a new dimension to their exploration of fiction.